Near A Raven

I had an email today from Ulrich Voigt, inviting me to join him and Rüdiger Gamm in a pi-memory contest. He's got a program that asks you for, say, the 93rd digit and you have to fill it in, or else the next two or ten or whatever digits after that point. He says "I feel that Rüdiger Gamm / Ben Pridmore / Ulrich Voigt might suceed in getting some sponsor to make the matter financially interesting", which I'm a bit sceptical about, to be honest, but I suppose anything's possible.

The question that mainly concerns me is whether I could be any good at this kind of thing. For the first hundred digits it would be a piece of cake - just give me ten minutes or so to memorise a hundred three-digit numbers (01-1, 02-4, 03-1 and so on) and I can blitz that no problem. But for a task like 5000 places, 10-digit answers, I would have to not only re-memorise pi (like I've been meaning to do for quite some time), but memorise it in a way more conducive to naming the nth digit on demand. Because the way I did it before is rather inconvenient for that purpose.

So I think I might do it, just for the challenge. But will anyone want to watch? Ulrich is a very big fan of this contest, but what it boils down to is someone tapping numbers into a computer. It's a bit incomprehensible for spectators, even after the whole premise has been explained to them. Still, you never know what will catch on, and I'll try anything once.

The Great World Memory Champions of History

In the fifteen years of its existence, the World Memory Championship has spawned many memorable world champions. Some of the most interesting are described here:

Rotisserie Vasquez (World Memory Champion 1654-1659) was conspicuous for his unusual hairstyle, refusal to wear clothing and utter disdain and loathing for every other competitor at the World Championships. He filed official complaints with the IFRS (the predecessor of the WMSC) on several occasions, saying that it was ‘unreasonable’ to expect him to have to compete against other human beings. He wrote several worst-selling books expanding on this theory, revolving around the general idea that the World Memory Championship each year should consist of himself in an empty room, performing whatever memory feat he saw fit, and telling the arbiters afterwards what he had done. In fairness, Vasquez was genuinely the greatest memoriser of his time. His achievements seem modest by 21st-century standards (his world record for memorising a pack of cards was seven years, three hundred and twenty-four days), but he outshone the other notable competitors of the sixteen-fifties by some margin, and seldom resorted to violence in his pursuit of the title.

Galadria Ntemi (World Memory Champion 1832, 1835, 1846, 1953) first competed in the world championships three weeks before her birth in 1827, finishing a creditable 7th out of 98 competitors. Dedicating herself to memory sports from an early age, she refused to speak to or acknowledge the existence of anyone or anything not directly related to the World Memory Championship, and astounded the pre-Victorian world with her capacity for recall of binary numbers, setting a world record of seventeen digits in thirty minutes in the course of winning her first championship in 1832. Prevented from competing in the majority of World Championships in the following years by repeated unrelated kidnappings by octopi (it has been speculated that she exuded a sort of pheromone irresistible to cephalopods), she nonetheless won with ease two more titles before drowning at the age of nineteen. Reincarnated in 1932 as a Glasgow fishwife, she struggled to adapt to the new century's advances in memory techniques, finishing in the top five every year for fifty-seven years, but only winning one more world title, in 1953 (aided by the ironic kidnapping by octopi of reigning champion and hot favourite Politesse Perkins).

Pippi Langstrumpf (World Memory Champion 1724-1739, 1815), who despite his name was male, was one of the two World Champions to hold the title without ever memorising anything. He inherited the title from his mother, Raymond Langstrumpf, during the period when the title of World Memory Champion was hereditary, rather than a contest of skill. Popular among memorisers, he attended the World Championship every year of his reign, but declined offers to compete, protesting that he was far too stupid. Eventually, it was decided that the hereditary title was unfair on the competitors and it reverted to a merit-based honour, after which Pippi retired from memory sports. He was awarded the 1815 title, nearly fifty years after his death, for largely political reasons.

Etsuko Teranishi (World Memory Champion 1901) was described by her predecessor "Le Clopinel", who had forgotten his glasses on every occasion the two memorisers met, as "the largest man I have ever seen, with towering beard and ears like goldfish". She in fact stood less than three feet tall and had ears more resembling bream, but her memory power was unquestionable. In the 1899 World Championship she astounded the competitors and spectators by memorising a three-digit number in five minutes, shattering the previous record of two, and followed it up with another world record of seven random words in fifteen minutes. She would probably have won the World Championship comfortably, had she not suffered a near-fatal heart attack during dinner on the second day which left her in a coma for eighteen months. Returning in 1901, not yet fully recovered and suffering lengthy bouts of unconsciousness during the competition, she won nonetheless when all the other competitors were kidnapped by octopi, surviving just long enough to receive the trophy before expiring.

All these champions and many more can be found in the Big Book Of The World Memory Championships, priced £352.95 in all good bookshops, and 27p in bad ones.

Bless this mess

I'm very nearly in the mood where I want to clean this place up a bit. Let's face it, this flat is extremely untidy, or to put it another way, filthy. I really should devote a whole day some time to scrubbing and disinfecting things, hoovering, picking up the comics and magazines and clothes and playing-card boxes and cardboard boxes and videos and books and palm trees and bits of sofa and sweet wrappers and electric keyboards that cover the floor, that kind of thing. And maybe, if I'm really feeling brave, cleaning the bathroom.

Also, and I realise I'm not the only person in the world saying this right now, since when does Easter start immediately after Christmas finishes? There are creme eggs and mini eggs and hot cross buns in the shops and it's January 11th! No, wait a minute. I like creme eggs, mini eggs and hot cross buns. I don't really have a problem with eating them all year round. I'm obviously only complaining because everybody else is. Long live six-month Easter food sales!

Roman room

This is my 493rd post on this blog. That means that in a week's time, give or take, I'll reach the fabled five hundred! Unless I have more problems with mathematics than I'm aware of, of course. So what should I do for the big occasion? I don't believe in celebrating minor anniversaries and landmarks, but 500 posts is a pretty big deal. Perhaps I should devote the whole day to writing the blog, and see just how many words I can churn out? Perhaps I should write some nonsense story, because it's a couple of months since I last did that. Perhaps I should subvert people's expectations and write one word (I'm leaning towards "potato")? Any more suggestions will be gratefully received, mentally filed away and forgotten about next Wednesday when I devote the historic post to insulting commentary about a minor television personality who's annoyed me.

I also need to learn how to do websites. Having decided to organise another Cambridge memory championship in May, I would really like there to be a nice-looking website I can point people to, featuring example memorisation and recall papers, rules phrased in a way that is comprehensible to beginners, basic how-to-memorise-numbers-and-cards information, pictures that give the impression that memory competitions are fun, all that kind of thing. Because (and I mean this in the nicest possible way) you can't really rely on the WMSC website to publish this kind of thing in a half-decent way.

Once I've got this wonderful website up and running, I intend to try to infiltrate Cambridge University and the surrounding area with the information that this competition is taking place, and attempt to persuade impressionable young students to give it a try. And also pester local businesses to see if we can arrange any kind of sponsorship to pay for the thing. Hopefully there'll be someone wanting to film it for a prospective documentary again, and I'll be able to hype this fact up for the advertising-hungry entrepreneurs of Cambridge. Of course, while I'm great at vaguely planning this kind of thing, I'm really terrible at putting it into practice, so we'll just have to see what, if anything, happens.

I just don't want to offend anyone

But if you buy a video from eBay and rather than what's supposed to be on it it contains an edition of Top of the Pops from April 1993 and part of an episode of The Bill from the same kind of time period, that's probably grounds for asking for your money back, maybe even leaving negative feedback, right?

But on the other hand, I only paid 30p for the tape, plus postage and packing, and I don't really want the money back that badly, nor the hassle of posting it back to whoever I bought it from. And it was one of those Cartoons R Fun tapes that I've mentioned before, produced so cheaply that they don't knock the copy-protection tabs out, so it's easy to tape over them by accident. And I always did like "Young At Heart" by the Bluebells, which was number one when this TOTP was made, and it's got the brilliant video on the tape. So I probably got as much enjoyment from the actual contents of the video, if not more, than I would have done from "Porky's Pastry Pirates". I'll just leave my usual glowing and positive feedback, rather than complaining.

Slight Return

Back to the normal, boring, live-from-our-Derby-studio blogs, after another four-and-a-half-hour train journey. Places really should be closer together. Still, it's comforting to know that the two of us are still good friends, that I still lose two out of three chess games and three out of three pool games on average and that it really isn't possible to run out of things to say about Doctor Who.

Also nice to know that one of the videos I found over the weekend doesn't have "Hollywood Steps Out" on it, claims on the packaging to the contrary, but does have "Have You Got Any Castles", which I also needed to find. I officially now have more videos than can fit in a single pile on top of the boiler cupboard. Well, I could stack them a bit higher, but then I wouldn't be able to reach the top row without a stepladder (as opposed to climbing on top of my computer like I do now). I also have many more books than can be safely piled on top of the cupboard in my bedroom, and almost too many to coat the floor of the room like they're doing at the moment. I need a bookcase. Several bookcases, in fact. And another flat to store them all in.

X Marks the spot

Something I could have mentioned yesterday, had I not felt that the joke about EastEnders was so much more important, was that during this Scottish sojourn I've been introduced to the wonders of geocaching.

It's a strange hobby involving tracking down hidden 'caches' by means of given co-ordinates and a GPS device. So this is a pastime combining healthy outdoor exercise with the latest in modern technology, and as such is something that I wholeheartedly approve of. On Saturday, we went to the extremely picturesque little town of South Queensferry to find three hidden containers - one of them we had to go on an educational treasure hunt to piece together the co-ordinates from dates on buildings and information boards; another, hidden near the Forth Rail Bridge, was a box containing not only the obligatory log book for everyone who finds it to sign, but various trinkets to swap and 'geocoins' to exchange. We had a delicious lunch in an extremely picturesque little cafe in between hunts, got lots of sea air and walking, and then came home to find that a brand new cache had just been hidden not far down the road, so had to rush out again to be the first to find it.

There's a whole huge community of people who hide and seek these little tupperware containers and the things inside them. Now that's the kind of subculture they should be making documentaries about! I find it fascinating, anyway, and I might just have to splash out on the technology and go treasure hunting around Derby when I get home.

The fruit bowl

EastEnders is so unrealistic sometimes. I've seen the last couple of episodes, for the first time in ages, and the conversation between Martin and Sonia really should have gone like this:

Sonia: Yeah, sorry, Martin, I did sort of kill your mother. My mistake.

Martin: Oh, that's okay. If memory serves, I killed your boyfriend a few years ago before we got married, so this makes us even.

I mean, why don't soap opera people just forgive and forget every now and then? It's no wonder they're so unhappy.

Tom Walton's Schooldays

As is probably compulsory for old school friends getting together, we've been reminiscing about the people we knew, teachers we liked and disliked, nationally famous comedians who we didn't really technically know so much as admire when he did brilliant comedy routines in assemblies and school shows but was three years above me so we weren't actually friends or anything, memorable chess competitions in Scunthorpe where it took Dr Chambers three hours to find the school, us twenty minutes to be soundly thrashed in all our games and the rest of the evening to find the way home again.

It occurs to me that all our school friends who we might want to look up on Google have spectacularly unexceptional names. How do you search for Tom Walton, James Richardson and Richard Taylor? Why can't people retroactively have the decency to have unusual surnames like Pridmore or Bickerdyke-Throgmorton? It probably wouldn't take too much work to find them, to be perfectly honest - Jimmy at least is on Friends Reunited, so it would just be a matter of paying however much they charge, sending him a message and hoping he gets it. Tom was last heard of joining the army, so it would be simple enough to declare war on everyone and everything and insisting on surrendering personally to him when the tanks roll up. And while we know nothing about Slosh's career after he left school, I definitely remember him having a pet cat, so we would just have to learn to speak cat-language and track him down through the global feline network. All cats know each other.

North of the border, down Edinburgh way

Live from Scotland! What other blog brings you that? Probably no other blog in the whole universe. I'm in Dave's living room, sharing my sleeping accommodations with Dylan the rabbit and a tank full of little fish. Which I'm assuming will be quieter than Crispy and Sleepy's hamsters, but you never know. Perhaps they're the kind of fish who have wild parties when the lights go off.

I haven't seen Dave, formerly known as Noddy, for something like six years, and he very unfairly hasn't physically changed even a tiny bit in that time, whereas I've gone all bald and bearded. We've spent the evening playing chess - normal chess, rifle chess, chess with grasshoppers instead of queens, five-leapers instead of knights and reflecting bishops - just like we used to waste our schooldays. It all comes flooding back. It's like we're stuck in a time loop, a never-ending time loop (that's an in-joke that only the two of us would get, so why I'm publishing it in this blog without explanation I can't imagine).

And tomorrow I'm going to explore the big city while Dave and Abi are at work, and see what kind of cartoon videos the charity shops of Edinburgh have to offer. And I only feel a tiny bit guilty about taking a break from the memory training/book writing routine after three days.

Over my shoulder a piano falls

I had a long phone conversation today with a TV producer - yet another prospective Channel 4 documentary about memory competitions. Still, one of them's sure to come to fruition one of these days, and this one sounds quite hopeful. We were talking for more than an hour, I think, although that's probably more of a testimony to my ability to waffle on and on about nothing than anything else.

Anyway, I'm off north of the border tomorrow, visiting my long-lost friend Dave who I haven't seen for years and years. So I probably won't post anything here till I come home next Monday (I don't know why I feel the need to mention that here, I just have visions of disappointed legions of fans tuning in to see my latest words of wisdom every day). I haven't been to Scotland since new year 2001, I think it was. I've only been to Wales once, and that was an accident. I need to broaden my horizons a bit more, I know.

Another one for the gallery

It's a strange time of year for people to be giving ancient cartoon videos to charity shops. Unwanted Christmas presents from 2006, yes, but this one I found today surely wasn't a recent gift. Or maybe it was, and the generous giver seriously misjudged the recipient. Still, for whatever reason, this wonderful Marc-illustrated masterpiece turned up in the Oxfam shop here in Derby at some point in the last couple of weeks, and I quickly snaffled it up. Another 'Vidage' release, and since this one is volume three, it's possible that there are others out there. I'll have to keep an eye open. It's bad art, even by Marc's standards, I have to say. I know that sounds nasty, but I honestly do admire him really.

And if you think I've been doing nothing but collecting cartoons in 2007 so far, shame on you. I've done a heck of a lot of memory training the last two days. I've got a pretty exhausting schedule, but if I keep it up until the world championships, I'll walk it. I've also been writing the book, and that's going quite well too. I'm almost doing as much work as I intended to do, which is a good start.

Although I am going to take a well-deserved holiday on Thursday when I go up to Edinburgh for a long weekend. That's the good thing about being unemployed.

013457689014658757562987032105-5

Didja see it? Huh? Did you? The climax of "The Sarah Jane Adventures" tonight hinged on memorising a big long number! Who says this whole memory thing has no real-life applications? If not for memory skills, the whole planet would have been taken over by aliens! Hey, do you think they stole the idea from my movie synopsis the other month?

Of course, if we're going to be just a tiny bit picky, I could point out that the number Luke mutters to himself while typing it into the communicator wasn't the same one that he heard earlier in the show, so technically the Bane should have killed them all and gone on to subvert the human race, but never mind. I liked this. A lot. I think it's going to be a very fun series. Elisabeth Sladen is brilliant in the Doctor role as the eccentric investigator, and she has good support from the young co-stars (although Porsha Lawrence-Mavour, playing the least important of the three kids' roles, seems to be the best actor by some distance - they're all quite acceptable, though).

Hopefully for the series proper they'll ease off on stories where almost the whole Earth's population fall under the mental control of the aliens, because we've had quite a lot of those just lately. Also it would be nice if they'd ease off on the CGI monsters - tonight's episode had one infuriating little moment when the alien chases our heroes up the stairs and runs right over a hat hanging on the bannister without moving it at all. That's just sloppy. Besides, I like to see a guy in a monster suit - the actors seem to react better when they can see what they're supposed to be reacting to. And while I'm criticising, Sarah Jane goes to great lengths to investigate the mystery drink, even getting scientist friends to analyse it for her, but never thinks to point her alien-life-detector watch at it!

Enough nit-picking. Like I said, I really liked this, and I think it might be a big success. But then, I like Torchwood, and that seems to be getting very mixed reviews. I'll have to try to redress the balance by raving about it after tonight's final two episodes. Well, I'll wait until they've been on BBC2 on Wednesday in case any of my devoted and non-Sky-having readers are still watching.

The most powerful man in the universe!

The whole New Year thing, as well as Auld Lang Syne, fireworks and Jools's Annual Hootenanny, means the annual World's Strongest Man competition on telly. The first heat was tonight, and I was watching it avidly as usual. In many ways, you know, strong man contests are very like memory championships - they have a small core of regular competitors who all seem to be good friends, they involve a range of specific disciplines that the competitors have to train for and that aren't just about pure strength, and the British competitors never win it nowadays. Yes, I just compared myself to Geoff Capes.

It came as something of a surprise to me to see that Mariusz Pudzianowski is 29 years old. I hadn't realised it until I saw the statistic on screen, but I instinctively think of strong men as being older than me. Probably because they're generally a foot taller and twice as heavy as I am, making me automatically think of them as grown-ups. I don't know if that's a universal syndrome, or just something for those like me who have difficulty remembering they're actually adults.

And incidentally, if I see one more advert for Barbie's dog Tanner with genuine excreting action (seriously), I'm going to have to stop watching the cartoon channels quite so much, or possibly just keep a brick handy to throw at the TV screen. Which seems like a good note to end the year on. Happy 2007!

The Persistence of Memory

I was practicing memory today before I was fully awake (I'm turning into a very late riser just recently - with not working, I seem to be shifting into a 25-hour day pattern and not getting tired until later and later at night), and getting on quite well - slightly slower than my best times in memorising, but recall much closer to 100% than usual without needing to think about it. After finishing with numbers and binary, I had a go at some speed cards, and only as I got to the end of the pack did I get a slight sense of deja vu. The last six cards were two fives, two sevens and two tens, and I thought to myself "didn't I memorise another pack a while ago that ended like that?"

Thinking back over the past minute or so, I suddenly realised that I'd picked up the pack of cards from the pile on the right-hand corner of my desk, where I keep the cards I've used in previous memorising sessions but haven't got round to shuffling yet, rather than the pile on the left of shuffled and ready-to-memorise packs. How can I remember the sequence of a pack of cards without too much effort, but forget an instinctive thing like picking up the pack from the left side (which is how I've ALWAYS kept my cards)?

Makes me wonder if I've done that before without even noticing it. As a side-effect of learning to memorise cards, I've developed the ability to instantly forget them after I don't need to recall them any more (so that I can reuse the mental journey they were on), and it was only that distinctive run of cards right at the end that rang a bell. Perhaps I'm actually just a big giant fraud, and whenever I think I've memorised a pack of cards in training, it was actually just the same pack over and over again.

Go stop

Neopets have just added their version of godori to their extensive library of games. It's one of those games that I've heard of before but never played, but there's something insanely addictive about it. I think I might have a gambling problem.

Neopets, all in all, is an amazingly good website - the only website I know that has its own functioning economy, although there are probably plenty of others out there somewhere. But Neopets is so overwhelmingly vast, unashamedly cute and unexpectedly clever that I can spend hours or days on end wandering around it when I'm in the mood. The rest of the time I neglect my poor pets, of course, and feel terribly guilty about it.

Clip show

It's nearly the end of the year. There's nothing on telly but shows about what's happened in 2006, nothing in the blogosphere but posts about what people have posted about in 2006, and on top of this I've spent the day writing emails, writing an article for the British Othello Federation newsletter that I suddenly remembered promising to write, not writing my book, and writing a big blog post tonight seems like more tap-tapping of keys than my fingers can cope with.

So in the spirit of doing something a bit different, here's something I found while dredging the depths of my huge cardboard box that contains all my important paperwork, looking for my CIMA registration number. It's an exciting story that I wrote on a particularly boring long plane journey a long time ago, and at first I thought it might be a good idea to type it up and put it on the blog. Then I realised that that would be even more work than actually writing a big long blog post, so I thought it would be even better to scan it and post it in that way. Hope it's more or less legible. I can read it, but then I'm used to my handwriting. There should be more handwritten blogs, don't you think?

Piper of poppy

I've just been watching "The Ruby In The Smoke" on BBC1. It was very well done, but there's just too much plot in the Philip Pullman book for a 90-minute TV adaptation. Even having read the book, it was hard to keep track of what was going on on screen. What happened to the days when the BBC would make this kind of book into six half-hour episodes or more, and show it as a serial? That kind of treatment would work much better for the Sally Lockhart books, because we need a bit of downtime here and there to show her, for example, settling in with the Garlands and becoming part of the family and business. To cram everything into the feature-length adaptation, they had to cut out all the scenes that didn't have a direct bearing on the multiple intertwined plot threads.

That said, Billie Piper was surprisingly brilliant as Sally. I really have to get over my prejudice against her, I know, but when I first heard about it I thought something along the lines of 'tchoh, why do the BBC insist on believing she can pass for a teenager?' And she very nearly did, this time! Not just from the makeup, but her acting too. I was impressed. The makeup was a bit excessive in one case at least - David Harewood plays both Bedwell twins, and yet they didn't look anything like each other, despite what the script said. And it was an interesting decision to cast black actors in a couple of parts, at least one of whom is required by the plot to blend in with the people in the Victorian London streets - but then, historical accuracy tends to just get in the way if you take it too seriously, and they never get it entirely right however hard they try.

I'm looking forward to the others - apparently they're planning to do at least the other two Sally books, which has to be a good thing. And here's another claim to fame of mine - Philip Pullman, before he was famous, was my good friend Fat Andy's English teacher. Apparently he was really great, too. Perhaps if I'd had him instead of Mrs Slater, my own writing career might not have been quite so entirely unsuccessful...

Big black horse and a cherry tree

I love that song. I wanted to come up with a good excuse to use it as a blog title, but couldn't, so I decided to just let it be a non sequitur. Anyway, Christmas is over, the goose is getting digested, penny for the thoughts under the famous black hat? Well, I've got Plans for what I'm going to do with my time from now on. Maybe not quite big enough Plans to really merit the capital P, but I like to make things sound important. I've got a proper schedule of book-writing, memory-training, working on this memory performance, learning to play that darn piano, things like that. I've got another TV producer to talk to, and I'll make an effort to see that this one goes somewhere. All in all, I want to make sure I'm busy enough to justify not working. If I ever confess here that I've been doing nothing all day, everyone reading this has to shout at me.

Absent friends

I'm really going to miss my dad phoning at the crack of dawn tomorrow morning, incoherently drunk already, to wish me a happy Christmas.

Hope everyone out there in internet land and beyond has a magical day! Happy Christmas, merry wishbone, happy Holiday, pleasant Festivus, anything else you might care to celebrate, do it with style.